Three pathways to better recognize the expertise of Global South researchers.

It is widely perceived how research institutes have been adopting the discourse of champions of diversity, inclusion, and equity (DEI) in recent years. Despite progress in diversity and inclusion in the academic environment, we highlight here that nothing or, at very best, little work has been done to overcome the scientific labor division in academic research that promotes neocolonial practices in academic recognition and jeopardizes equity. In this piece, we bring secondary data that reinforce biased patterns in academic recognition between Global North and South (geographical markers and citation bias), and propose three actions that should be adopted by researchers, research institutes, journals, and scientific societies from the Global North that allows for a fairer recognition of the academic expertise produced by the Global South.

Learning from a climate disaster: The catastrophic floods in southern Brazil.

The catastrophic floods that affected southern Brazil last May should serve as a warning to human societies that, despite the still widespread climate change skepticism or denial, mitigation and adaptation to cope with the ongoing climate crisis are urgently needed. The toll was 213 people killed or missing; 2.4 million people affected, including 600,000 displaced; and unprecedented losses in urban and rural infrastructure, including livestock.

Disentangling the veil line for Brazilian biodiversity: An overview from two long-term research programs reveals huge gaps in ecological data reporting.

The lack of synthesized information regarding biodiversity is a major problem among researchers, leading to a pervasive cycle where ecologists make field campaigns to collect information that already exists and yet has not been made available for a broader audience. This problem leads to long-lasting effects in public policies such as spending money multiple times to conduct similar studies in the same area. We aim to identify this knowledge gap by synthesizing information available regarding two Brazilian long-term biodiversity programs and the metadata generated by them.

Global patterns of vascular plant alpha diversity.

Global patterns of regional (gamma) plant diversity are relatively well known, but whether these patterns hold for local communities, and the dependence on spatial grain, remain controversial. Using data on 170,272 georeferenced local plant assemblages, we created global maps of alpha diversity (local species richness) for vascular plants at three different spatial grains, for forests and non-forests. We show that alpha diversity is consistently high across grains in some regions (for example, Andean-Amazonian foothills), but regional 'scaling anomalies' (deviations from the positive correlation) exist elsewhere, particularly in Eurasian temperate forests with disproportionally higher fine-grained richness and many African tropical forests with disproportionally higher coarse-grained richness.

Reference values and drivers of diversity for South Brazilian grassland plant communities.

The South Brazilian grasslands (Campos Sulinos) form the dominant vegetation in southern Brazil. They are species-rich ecosystems that occur under distinct geomorphological and climatic conditions but spatial variation of plant species diversity remains understudied. Here, we present a detailed description of plant communities across the region.

Climatic and soil factors explain the two-dimensional spectrum of global plant trait variation.

Plant functional traits can predict community assembly and ecosystem functioning and are thus widely used in global models of vegetation dynamics and land-climate feedbacks. Still, we lack a global understanding of how land and climate affect plant traits. A previous global analysis of six traits observed two main axes of variation: (1) size variation at the organ and plant level and (2) leaf economics balancing leaf persistence against plant growth potential.

Phylogenetic uncertainty and the inference of patterns in community ecology and comparative studies.

Progress in phylogenetic community ecology is often limited by the availability of phylogenetic information and the lack of appropriate methods and solutions to deal with this problem. We estimate the effect of the lack of phylogenetic information on the relations among taxa measured by commonly used phylogenetic metrics in comparative studies and community ecology, namely: Blomberg's K phylogenetic signal, Faith's Phylogenetic Diversity (PD), Mean Phylogenetic Distance (MPD) and Mean Nearest Taxon Distance (MNTD). To overcome this problem, we tested two possible solutions: Polytomic trees and Operational trees.

Plant functional groups associate with distinct arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal communities.

The benefits of the arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) symbiosis between plants and fungi are modulated by the functional characteristics of both partners. However, it is unknown to what extent functionally distinct groups of plants naturally associate with different AM fungi. We reanalysed 14 high-throughput sequencing data sets describing AM fungal communities associating with plant individuals (2427) belonging to 297 species.

Long-term ecological research in southern Brazil grasslands: Effects of grazing exclusion and deferred grazing on plant and arthropod communities.

Grazing exclusion may lead to biodiversity loss and homogenization of naturally heterogeneous and species-rich grassland ecosystems, and these effects may cascade to higher trophic levels and ecosystem properties. Although grazing exclusion has been studied elsewhere, the consequences of alleviating the disturbance regime in grassland ecosystems remain unclear. In this paper, we present results of the first five years of an experiment in native grasslands of southern Brazil.

Phylogenetic patterns and phenotypic profiles of the species of plants and mammals farmed for food.

The origins of agriculture were key events in human history, during which people came to depend for their food on small numbers of animal and plant species. However, the biological traits determining which species were domesticated for food provision, and which were not, are unclear. Here, we investigate the phylogenetic distribution of livestock and crops, and compare their phenotypic traits with those of wild species.

Plant species richness and functional traits affect community stability after a flood event.

Climate change is expected to increase the frequency and magnitude of extreme weather events. It is therefore of major importance to identify the community attributes that confer stability in ecological communities during such events. In June 2013, a flood event affected a plant diversity experiment in Central Europe (Jena, Germany).

Response to Comment on "Worldwide evidence of a unimodal relationship between productivity and plant species richness".

Tredennick et al. criticize one of our statistical analyses and emphasize the low explanatory power of models relating productivity to diversity. These criticisms do not detract from our key findings, including evidence consistent with the unimodal constraint relationship predicted by the humped-back model and evidence of scale sensitivities in the form and strength of the relationship.

Landowner perceptions of the value of natural forest and natural grassland in a mosaic ecosystem in southern Brazil.

The forest-grassland mosaics of southern Brazil have been subject to many land use and policy changes over the decades. Like many grasslands around the world, the grasslands are declining with few conservation efforts underway. In contrast, forests receive much attention and many incentives.